THE FRINGE OF POLITICS

"It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in the first place or in the second place."

Whateley (quoted by Lord Morley in Compromise).

I

Though by the outbreak of war, their progress towards the House of Commons had brought but few of the younger politicians to a constituency and fewer still to a contested election, a great part of the years from 1909 until 1914 was inevitably taken up by political studies in a highly-charged atmosphere. The controversies of that time were waged with a bitterness of which the straitest recluse could not remain unaware; and the unsated passions of Westminster were carried to Pall Mall and fed to new inspiration in the adjoining, ever-open temples of the two great parties.

The Reform Club, own sister to Bridgewater House, standing between the Travellers' and the Carlton, is the home constructed by Sir Charles Barry for the supporters of the reform act of 1832 and for their successors. A necessary qualification for membership is that the candidate shall be a "reformer", though the rules do not indicate whether it is sufficient for him to support the reform of the divorce law or of the tariff; and until 1886 a reformer and a liberal were synonymous. After the home rule split of that year, the Gladstonians in this as in every liberal club blackballed a Hartingtonite candidate, the Hartingtonites blackballed a Gladstonian candidate, and both combined to blackball an uncertain candidate till a truce had to be declared if the club was to survive. In the headquarters of the liberal party, so loveless a union was doomed to a short life; when incompatibility of temper passed beyond patience and hope, judgement was given for the home rulers; and, though a few of the unionists kept their names on the books, the majority of the seceders drew daily closer to the conservative party, and the club once more became the headquarters of liberalism.

So it has remained to this day; and the chief party meetings, such as that in December 1916 when Mr. Asquith announced to his followers the resignation of the first coalition, take place within its walls; though mercifully free from the control of the party whips, it is still to liberalism very much what the Carlton is to conservatism; a liberal member of Parliament takes precedence of other candidates in the order of election; and the only problem that can now perplex the club is the old question, "What is a liberal?" and the new rider, "Who is leader of the liberal party?"

It was not to be expected that the conditions of life in even the oldest and most famous clubs could escape the social revolution which was observable before the war and which the war accelerated. For several years before 1914 the peculiar glory of club life in London was coming to be regarded as one of London's departed glories: the parsimonious father no longer automatically entered his infant son's name for five or six clubs, the impatient candidate was no longer content to linger indefinitely in the upper reaches of a waiting-list, and the growing absence of restraint in all social relationships broke out into intolerance of the crusted conservatism to which young members of other days had submitted uncomplainingly. The war, in checking the normal flow of fresh blood, caused some clubs to waste and die, others to turn a more anÆmic scrutiny on the qualifications of their candidates; and, with the coming of peace, the cry has again been heard that even the most historic institutions must modernize themselves or forfeit the allegiance of those who require a place where they can play squash racquets and invite women to meals. It is so doubtful whether club life will ever regain its Victorian popularity and prestige that a student of changing manners may perhaps be forgiven for halting to uncover at the sound of one more passing bell.

As the nebulous quality of being a reformer is the sole positive requirement of a candidate for the Reform Club, the membership is more varied than in most. Naturally, liberal politicians abound; the bar and civil service are well represented, but probably no association which is primarily political contains also quite so many non-political elements. From the days of Thackeray and James Payn to those of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett it has always bound a spell on men of letters: Henry James had a bedroom there in his later years; and novelists, whether or no they can boast the honour of membership, alike seem unable to keep it out of their novels. Jules Verne laid the first and last scenes of Round the World in Eighty Days in the card-room of the club, and it is chastening for a vegetarian to reflect that in those virile days your reformer breakfasted succulently off steaks and chops; it is impossible not to suspect more than one sly description in some of H. G. Wells' later novels, while in Marriage—beyond doubt or cavil—one character leaves the ice and idealism of Labrador, if not for the flesh-pots of the Reform Club, at least with the knowledge that "pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutnee, and then old cheese to follow...."

From a corner of the Reform Club young political aspirants had an unrivalled opportunity of watching for ten years the history of liberalism in the making. With hardly an exception the ministers were all members; and most of them used the club regularly. The great liberal triumph of 1906 had brought everything but homogeneity: there was enthusiasm, authority and numbers, but there was also suspicion and a memory of old feuds. The Liberal Leaguers, it was generally believed, would have liked to banish Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to the House of Lords; but both he and his backing of nonconformist radicals were too strong for them. On his resignation the liberal party presented the anomalous spectacle of a radical, peace-loving, nonconformist body with a Liberal League head; and the first election of 1910 was required to unify the party. In the cabinet and in the House of Commons there is a difference, almost incomprehensible to those outside, between the position of a prime minister who has succeeded to the heritage won by another and the position of a prime minister who has gone into action at the head of his army and has been invoked and acclaimed in five hundred single combats. Though he had squandered the vast majority which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman bequeathed to him, Mr. Asquith returned in 1910 with enhanced prestige as the leader of a party which had gone to the polls in his name.

The years from 1906 until 1910—the "Mad Parliament"[18]—had been primarily a time of political education or disillusion for the liberals who entered the House of Commons with unlimited idealism, limited experience and unbounded ignorance of parliamentary forms. In the first flush of victory they cleared the Rand of its indentured Chinese labour and carried out the settlement of South Africa by a grant of self-government: to such an avalanche of power the opposition could offer no resistance, and, so long as the government effected its reforms by executive action, the reserve of the old guard could not be brought up. It was when, with a curiously negative passion for reversal, ministers tried to upset the Taff Vale judgement and the Balfour education and licensing acts that new legislation was needed; and to new legislation the conservatives could offer an opposition to overcome the most bloated of majorities. The Birrell education bill and the new licensing bill were destroyed by the House of Lords; the trades disputes bill, after hanging by the neck, was cut down before it was dead. Of the three, this was the one most open to attack in that it placed trades unions, in some respects, above the law; it was allowed to pass, amid salvos of abuse, because the House of Lords would not then risk a direct challenge to organized labour; and this cynical opportunism discredited the Lords far more than had their partial and reactionary assault on all bills submitted by a liberal government.

Either of these rebuffs constituted, in the eyes of the party stalwarts, an occasion for war; and those who remembered the dismal policy of "filling up the cup" in the Gladstone-Rosebery administration yearned for a short, sharp contest in which the malevolence of the House of Lords should be fettered for all time. Nevertheless, the memory of even a successful election is so little alluring that the liberal majority of those days did not wish to engage in a second: the politician of detached judgement surmised that, when the Nationalists had secured special favours for Catholics and when all parties had united to concede them to the Jews, it was invidious to refuse similar treatment to the Church of England. In rejecting the education bill, the House of Lords aroused little practical hostility, however much its action may have offended doctrinaire democrats; and so artificial was the tattered passion aroused by the Balfour education act of 1902 that, when it ceased to furnish platform capital, it was left to function unmolested and is still operative after nearly twenty years. Similarly, when the licensing bill was thrown out, the House of Lords was so far from being reprobated by any but prohibitionists and professional partisans that it even won the sympathy of the average man by preventing an intolerable interference with his personal habits and by securing to the threatened license-holder his means of living. Some such reflections, occurring even to the less detached politicians, disposed them to wait for a more certain triumph than was promised by the half-hearted support accorded to their rejected bills; an opportunity was provided by the budget of 1909; and Mr. Asquith's first general election of 1910 was fought to reaffirm the hitherto long unquestioned control of finance by the House of Commons.

If the new liberal majority was smaller and now dependent on the nationalist vote, it was at least inspired by an unanalytical admiration for its chief such as no prime minister had enjoyed since the fanatical personality of Mr. Gladstone drew an equally fanatical devotion from his followers. Personal shyness and intellectual aloofness deprived Mr. Asquith of the love felt for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman by all who came in contact with him; he never pretended passionate enthusiasms nor roused in others the passionate enthusiasm which caused Mr. Lloyd George to be cheered through a division-lobby; he was never the sole hero of a great bill as Mr. Lloyd George was the sole hero of the 1909 budget; outside the House he never won the adoration of the proletariat as Mr. Lloyd George won—and to some extent kept—it by his Limehouse campaign; and, when fire was needed in debate, Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Churchill was left to supply it. Nevertheless, lack of temperament and limitation of heart were compensated, in Mr. Asquith, by the unlimited ascendancy of his head. Eloquent, emphatic, and unruffled, patient, experienced and resourceful, the intellectual and dialectical superior of the oldest parliamentarian in the House and the wisest tactician on either side, a survivor from Mr. Gladstone's last cabinet and Mr. Gladstone's most brilliant discovery, Mr. Asquith exacted, even from those who resisted him in the Liberal League days, a blind loyalty which carried him through four years of the hottest and most unintermittent domestic fighting in English political history; it carried him, with closed ranks, into the war and through nearly two and a half years of the war, though many felt in their hearts that, by the policy which made war possible, he had betrayed liberalism and that, by the unheralded formation and dissolution of the first coalition, he had betrayed the liberal party. After the December crisis of 1916 the loyalty of his followers, with their English love for an old, popular favourite, insisted that he should still remain at their head; and, when he lost his seat in 1918, he retained his leadership. The general election in that year extinguished his party; it was characteristic of the men he led and of the leader they followed that, when all was lost but faith, they set loyalty to their old chief above private and public interest.

II

From the budget crisis of 1909 until the party crisis of 1916 Mr. Asquith, as the Nestor first of his party and then of his coalition, was by so much the most commanding figure in public life that posterity seemed likely, in reading the history of those years, to concentrate upon his name as exclusively as this age concentrates on that of Mr. Pitt, while forgetting the names of his lieutenants as completely as the casual reader in these days has forgotten the names of Mr. Pitt's. Had he remained in office till the armistice to enjoy the fruits of this early war-administration, his fame would probably have transcended Mr. Pitt's, as the late war transcended in magnitude the war against Napoleon; had he resigned voluntarily, with every honour that could be bestowed upon him, three months before the December downfall, he would have shared with his successor whatever credit history may accord to the political leaders in the war. The time and the manner of his resignation dwarf his personality and his achievements before those of Mr. Lloyd George as the achievements and personality of Lord Aberdeen were dwarfed before those of Lord Palmerston. "Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall from power," writes the anonymous author of The Mirrors of Downing Street; "it was as if a pin had dropped."

Seven years earlier he seemed to his supporters, inside the House and out, a leader who could wrest a party victory from the jaws of political death. Whoever unloosed the winds, it was always Mr. Asquith who harnessed and rode them. Thus, Mr. Lloyd George, confident that the House of Lords had, by constitutional convention, no power to tamper with a money-bill, departed so far from the traditional conception of the budget as a means of balancing expenditure and revenue that the House of Lords was threatened with loss of control over any measure which could be shielded by a financial clause. It was a bold challenge, boldly accepted; the House of Lords threw out the budget. No general election could paralyse their powers more completely than the device which the chancellor of the exchequer was seeking to introduce. With equal boldness the prime minister followed up his challenge by advising a dissolution.

Mr. Asquith's ministry was returned to power with authority to piece together and carry its mutilated programme, though the authority was by now so much diminished that the opposition regarded itself and the country as lying at the mercy of a small and tyrannous junto: had they voted by inclination, the nationalists would have assailed the budget, but they gave their support as a consideration for the later help of British liberals who indeed called themselves home rulers, but were more interested in other issues. From 1910 onwards log-rolling by groups became the first condition of the government's existence; and, before ever the House met, the whips' office was conscious of the change. Political history from 1910 to 1914 is the record of the government's attempts to meet its liabilities. The great bills were introduced: home rule, Welsh disestablishment and electoral reform; they were rejected, and the parliament bill was drafted to secure that these and other bills, when passed by the House of Commons without change in three consecutive sessions, automatically became law. There was another election, keenly resented by those who regarded it as unnecessary and complained that they had been misled by the prime minister's Albert Hall speech; and Mr. Asquith was empowered to say that, if the House of Lords rejected the parliament bill, new peers would be created until the government had a majority; the bill passed.

After less than ten years, many are forgetting the political passions of those days. To a radical this contest was far the greatest democratic victory since the first reform bill, and Mr. Asquith, after nearly twenty years, seemed to be buckling on the sword which Mr. Gladstone laid down when, in the last speech delivered by him in the House of Commons, he warned his party of the conflict which had been forced upon them: to an Irishman, it was the promise of freedom and self-government. Nowhere could there be found room for compromise, though the opposition saw only the coming of mob-rule and confiscation, the betrayal of Ulster and the spoliation of the church. It is small wonder if war was carried to the knife and fork, if old friendships broke, as in the days of the first home rule bill, and if stern, unbending tories stalked disgustedly from drawing-rooms when ministers and their families entered.

Many, too, are forgetting how closely fought was the contest. Blood, it was boasted, would flow under Westminster Bridge before the "backwoodsmen" gave way; the whips' office was reported to have its lists ready, and new peers were to be created in batches until their opponents abandoned the futile opposition; while the final debate was taking place in the House of Lords, the first commissioner was at work on the plans for converting Westminster Hall into a chamber capable of seating the new creations. No one, even as the last division took place, could predict confidently how the votes would be cast.

The victory of the government brought to an end the greatest constitutional struggle of a century. Henceforward the will of the majority, expressed through its representatives in the House of Commons and thrice affirmed, could no longer be withstood by the House of Lords in its existing or in any reformed state; for the second time in twenty years Ireland looked through an open door at the vision of freedom. It may be that the war, in overturning all political conditions, has caused the parliament act to be no longer needed: the days of conflict between the two houses may have passed away in 1914, and from the present disorder and sorrow of Ireland may emerge a settlement not less enduring than was foreshadowed in the third home rule bill; but, whether or not there be one to mourn its death, all must recognise that the parliament act is dead, and, unless its fruits are to be secured by other means, it were better that it had never been born with its promise of hope and its fulfilment of despair. If war with Germany was inevitable—an hypothesis which increasing numbers find themselves unable to accept—democracy and nationalism would have fared better by its coming in 1911; if the act of God had displaced the liberal ministers on the morrow of their victory, it would have been better for their reputation and for the principles which they professed. For a moment they and their redoubtable leader loomed big as any of the greatest parliamentary figures in history; neither Canning nor Grey, neither Palmerston nor Gladstone could shew a fairer record of achievement in the long battle for democracy and the untrammelled development of small nations.

It was only for a moment. Political history from the passing of the parliament act is the history of liberalism in its decline and fall. Were ministers exhausted by their effort? Were they men who could only do a piece of work when it was forced upon them? Among his great qualities it is doubtful whether the prime minister could include enthusiasm, though he worked in office with the mechanical efficiency and speed of a hard-pressed barrister; it is certain that he could not be credited with imagination: the Irish ideal and the Ulster ideal floated at an equal distance above the practical head of a man who had been taught and trained to distrust enthusiasm and to reject idealism. His biographer may search through his speeches and writings for one hint of vision or a single glimmer of sympathy with anything but material logic; he might as profitably search through the sole published speech of Gallio and the comment of his chronicler. Want of vision was temporarily compensated by adroitness in escaping the consequences of this defect. For the next five years, friends and enemies agreed that there was no one to equal Mr. Asquith in his tactical retreat from a crisis; the enemies added that, until a crisis arose, he never exerted himself; the friends began to wonder whether the highest statesmanship consisted in overcoming one crisis by creating another, by exchanging an Irish crisis for a European crisis until, in the final crisis of December 1916, when for the last time he bade his followers choose between Nicias and Cleon, a majority voted for any change from the long and precarious policy of brilliant improvisations.

As an instrument of government, the liberal ministry declined in power as its prestige declined; and its prestige suffered a severe blow on the day when the public was informed that Mr. Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Rufus Isaacs, the attorney-general, and the Master of Elibank, chief liberal whip, had been buying American Marconi shares. The attorney-general's brother was associated with the English company; and the more credulous section of the public, never reluctant to learn or to invent a scandal among the highly-placed, jumped to the conclusion that ministers with access to information withheld from the public had been speculating in stocks which their official position enabled them to influence in their own favour. A widespread outcry arose, a commission of enquiry was set up, ministers were examined and the findings of the commissioners were published. As a cynic observed at the time:

"The tories don't care a damn, but they have to pretend to be shocked; the liberals are shocked, but they have to pretend not to care a damn."

After weeks of excited recrimination, public interest gradually cooled; the hostile press had to admit that there had been no corruption, however injudiciously the ministers had behaved. The episode might have been forgotten, the prestige of the government might have recovered if a concession had been made to the virtuous indignation of those who were shocked by the "scandal" and of those who persuaded themselves that they were shocked; no prime minister is strong enough to despise with impunity the suspicion that, because he cannot afford to lose them, or because he is indifferent to their offence, he is retaining colleagues for whose resignation he should have asked. Too lofty of soul to regard the prejudices of the vulgar and perhaps reluctant to present Mr. Lloyd George to the labour party or to the radical wing of the ministerialists, the government listened only to the dictates of logic and loyalty: if the three ministers were innocent of dishonest purpose or practice, they must not be persecuted; indiscretion was not a hanging offence. The Master of Elibank soon afterwards abandoned political life to take up, as Lord Murray of Elibank, a responsible position with a firm of contractors; Sir Rufus Isaacs left the House of Commons to become lord chief justice; Mr. Lloyd George remained guardian of the public purse; and the less punctilious governments of the world from Mexico to France warmed to a feeling of cordial fellowship with methods which they seemed to recognise and with men whom they seemed to understand.

This obedience to the findings of the commission was strictly logical; and in refusing to be swayed by ignorant prejudice the prime minister gave one more instance of his unfailing loyalty to colleagues who, it cannot be said too often, were innocent of all dishonesty. Nevertheless, in the mouths of weaker men there lingered an unpleasant taste; and, if no one was seriously surprised or hurt by the conduct of the principals, even the most cynical member of parliament was offended by the unprotesting tolerance of such men as Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, of whom a more inflexible standard was expected. It was felt that, when a speculating chancellor of the exchequer continued in office, it must be because his chief was insensible to the undesirability of such practises, or because he was too sensible of his lieutenant's value as a vote-catcher; it was regretfully surmised that the prime minister would throw a protecting mantle over his colleagues, whatever they did, and that his colleagues could do what they liked because the head of the government would never call for their resignation.

The sense that the prime minister would only stir himself to use his authority in a crisis encouraged a spirit of lawlessness which in the years following led to active disorder and the threat of civil war; secure in the belief that they were too valuable to be dismissed and free from fear that the head of the government would call them to order, his less temperate colleagues were stimulated to a license of speech and to an independence of action that threatened the solidity of cabinet rule and prepared the rift which ultimately broke the party. These were the days when the blood of Marlborough, warming in Mr. Winston Churchill's veins, urged him to take personal part in a military campaign against a couple of hooligans in the east end of London; they were the days of Mr. Lloyd George's more finished Limehouse manner. And, while it is fair to assume that the prime minister's intellectual fastidiousness recoiled from this exuberance of action and speech, he did nothing to dissociate himself from it publicly.

The same lethargy brooded over the beginning of every new crisis. In addition to a long succession of labour troubles, occasionally composed at the eleventh hour, but usually flourishing to the general discomfort of the community at the thirteenth, ministers, in their lofty refusal to be stampeded, allowed two incipient rebellions against public order to reach a point of success and determination at which one could put a pistol to the head of the government and the other could demonstrate that the executive lacked power to quell unruliness. During these years the agitation in favour of female suffrage is only of interest in so far as it encouraged the enemies of England in their belief that the strength of the government was paralysed. The parliamentary vote has now been conceded to women; Mr. Asquith, its most stalwart antagonist, has seen that he mistook a prejudice for a principle and has repaired his mistake. In the three years before the war, however, he was not yet so well convinced of women's fitness to govern that he would allow female suffrage to become a line of party division. The suffragettes spoke and stormed, burnt and broke; their adherents in the House of Commons were not numerous enough to force a bill through; and the government was amply justified in not lending support to a cause which had no certain popular backing in the country.[19] But, if the time was not yet ripe for a parliamentary contest, the executive had at least a duty in maintaining public order. The weakness displayed by ministers in handling this series of sporadic rebellions suggested to other discontented parties in England, Ireland and Germany that ministers were powerless to govern; a critic with any detachment wondered, in spite of himself, why the English fancied that they had any genius for self-government.

III

Salvation by violence, never a healthy doctrine to inculcate, was peculiarly dangerous teaching for a section of the Irish who had been told for almost thirty years that they would be justified in offering forcible resistance to any attempt on the part of the imperial parliament to press home rule upon them. When ministers honoured their obligation to the nationalist party by whose votes they had been kept in office since 1910, the Orangemen announced that they would resist by force. Cynics in England may have been amused, seekers after truth outside England must have been shocked to find the Irish "loyalists"[20] threatening armed resistance to an act which could only come into force on the authority of the king of Great Britain and Ireland and of the imperial parliament; if not shocked, even the avowed anarchist must have been surprised to find the experiment in constructive treason blessed and headed by the Right Honourable Sir Edward Carson, K.C., M.P., one time a law-officer of the crown and a man committed by his privy councillor's oath to loyalty towards his soveran. But these were restless and unbalanced times, in which constitutionalism came to be regarded as an outworn shibboleth: the bitter struggle over the 1909 budget, the two general elections within a single year and the more bitter struggle over the parliament bill had familiarized the people of Great Britain with a new violence of language, of boast and of threat. The Ulster covenant and the Ulster volunteers, appealing to the twin boyish love—in such men as Mr. F. E. Smith, K.C., M.P.—of a secret society and of playing at soldiers, afforded a new thrill to jaded spirits who were perhaps disappointed that, though the parliament bill had passed, no blood had flowed under Westminster Bridge.

Behind Sir Edward Carson stood a young Englishman in a hurry and a Canadian, no longer young, who had been entrusted with the delicate task of teaching the conservative party a newer and better style of parliamentary opposition than Mr. Balfour had been able to inculcate; the Irish problem united the three indissolubly, and for present violence and later responsibility there is little to choose between them.

"I could contribute," said Mr. F. E. Smith on 18.6.12, "very little to the military efficiency of those who were resisting the Regular Forces or the still more formidable invasion from the South, but...."

"I can imagine," said Mr. Bonar Law, on 27.7.12, "no length of resistance to which Ulster will go which I shall not be ready to support."

"We will shortly challenge the Government," said Sir Edward Carson on the same day. "They may tell us if they like that this is treason. We are prepared to take the consequences."

"I do not care tuppence whether it is treason or not," proclaimed Sir Edward Carson on 21.9.12.

"Supposing," Mr. F. E. Smith suggested on 25.9.12, "the Government gave such an order, the consequences can only be described in the words of Mr. Bonar Law, when he said, 'if they did so it would not be a matter of argument, but the population of London would lynch you on the lamp-posts.'"

"The Attorney-General," boasted Sir Edward Carson, himself an old solicitor-general and a future attorney-general, on 11.10.12, "says that my doctrines and the course I am taking lead to anarchy. Does he not think I know that?"

"If you attempt to enforce this Bill ...," threatened Mr. Bonar Law on 1.1.13, "I shall assist them in resisting it."

"We will set up a Government," announced Sir Edward Carson on 7.9.13. "I am told it will be illegal. Of course it will. Drilling is illegal ... the Government dare not interfere."

"Ulster will do well to resist, and we will support her in her resistance to the end," promised Mr. Bonar Law on 28.11.13.

"The red blood will flow," prophesied Sir Edward Carson on 17.1.14.

"To coerce Ulster ... no right to ask army to undertake," decided Mr. Bonar Law. "Any officer who refuses is only doing his duty."

"The day I shall like best," said Sir Edward Carson on 20.6.14, less than six weeks before the beginning of war with Germany, "is the day upon which I am compelled, if I am compelled, to tell my men, 'You must mobilize.'"

"If the occasion arises," Mr. Bonar Law undertook on 28.9.14, eight weeks after war had broken out, "we shall support you to the last in any steps which Sir Edward Carson and your leaders think it necessary for you to take."[21]

While the leader of the unionist party, a former solicitor-general and the rising hope of the spent and broken tories were restrained from using language that could be borrowed by malcontents less highly placed, their followers imposed less check on the unaffected poetry of their natures.

"There is a spirit spreading abroad," declared Captain Craig (Morning Post, 9.1.11[22]), "which I can testify to from my personal knowledge that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and the Molly Maguires."

"If they were put out of the Union ...," proclaimed Major F. Crawford, a Larne gun-runner, on 29.4.12, "he would infinitely prefer to change his allegiance right over to the Emperor of Germany or any one else who had got a proper and stable government."

And even Mr. Bonar Law ventured to state, even in the House of Commons, on 1.1.13:

"It is a fact which I do not think any one who knows anything about Ireland will deny, that these people in the North-East of Ireland, from old prejudices perhaps more than from anything else, from the whole of their past history, would prefer, I believe, to accept the government of a foreign country rather than submit to be governed by hon. gentlemen below the gangway."

"It may not be known to the rank and file of Unionists," announced The Irish Churchman on 14.11.13, "that we have the offer of aid from a powerful continental monarch who, if Home Rule is forced on the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching it to his dominion, believing, as he does, that if our king breaks his coronation oath by signing the Home Rule Bill he will, by so doing, have forfeited his claim to rule Ireland. And should our king sign the Home Rule Bill, the Protestants of Ireland will welcome this continental deliverer as their forefathers, under similar circumstances, did once before."

Since the consequences of their menace have been observed in the desolation of a hundred million homes throughout the world, Orangemen have not dwelt with pride on this aspect of their campaign; and, even at the time when the last threat was uttered, the more temperate souls felt that the controversy was being pushed beyond the limit of fair government-baiting. Weapons of an older type were brought into play: Ulstermen, who of all dour, independent races can best look after themselves, were depicted as the future spiritual and financial victims of "Rome rule"; and of the plea that Ulster only wished to remain a part of Great Britain and Ireland much was made by controversialists who would not consent to be governed for a day, had the tables been turned, by an insignificant minority of Ulster nationalists, backed by political sympathizers in another country.

With the thunder of opposing oratory mingled the rattle of grounding arms and the tramp of marching feet; but, though the Orangemen warned the government that the Ulster rebels were too much in earnest to be disregarded, ministers were by now grown indifferent to the bluff of their enemies, the counsel of the disinterested and the public insults which highly-placed ladies showered upon them with impunity at court and in private houses. Whether the anarchy and treason, preached and admitted by Sir Edward Carson, would ever have flamed into civil war is a matter of guess-work. The nationalist leaders, rightly or wrongly, thought that it would not; the prime minister who afterwards discounted the strength of nationalist idealism from August, 1914, until the Easter rising was unlikely to give its true value, whatever that might be, to the strength of unionist idealism two years before; by now, moreover, he was too well used to actual crises to be alarmed by a crisis which had not yet arisen. Mr. Birrell, the chief secretary, was too busily engaged in concealing his defects as an administrator under his brilliance as an epigrammatist to supply the imagination that his leader lacked. No attempt was made to scotch the rebellion or bring the ringleaders to book; enrolment increased, drilling continued, arms were purchased and imported. In the spring of 1914 some uneasiness made itself felt in the bosom of Colonel Seely, the secretary of state for war, and a confidential question directed to the loyalty of the troops stationed at the Curragh elicited that a number of officers, holding the king's commission, would refuse to obey orders if commanded to proceed against the Ulster rebels.

Though it was still a matter of guess-work whether the Orangemen would rise, no one could doubt that, in the event of a rising, there would be difficulty in making the army obey its orders. No less a person than the leader of the opposition had said that the officer who refused would only be doing his duty. For a few hours the House of Commons tried heatedly to assert itself against this attempt to establish a military ascendancy over parliament; the tail wagged and came near to lashing the dog; but the creation of a crisis created with it an opportunity for the prime minister to shew his adroitness in overcoming crises; Colonel Seely resigned, and Mr. Asquith undertook the administration of the War Office, thereby surprising the Curragh and the House of Commons so completely that the revolts in both places flickered out. The government, however, had only escaped from one difficulty by plunging into a greater; ministers, at last realising that Ulster must be coerced or conciliated and that Sir Edward Carson, relying on his volunteers, was pressing them harder than Mr. Redmond, who could only rely on a government's honour, decided to conciliate. It was announced that the home rule scheme must be amended; a conference was summoned; the Orangemen were comforted by a promise that the home rule act would not be enforced without an amending act; and ministers committed themselves to a formula which has become an accession-oath to succeeding administrations: Ulster must not be coerced. To a liberal, the idea of coercion is so hateful that he welcomes any declaration which undertakes to circumscribe its tyranny; if it has to be applied, he would sooner see one man in bonds and three at large than one at large and three in bonds; but the liberal loathing of oppression, as expressed by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, seems to have been confined to onehalf of one province of Ireland. To the tortured and distracted other three provinces their process of thought has never been satisfactorily explained.

In the venerable story of an international gathering which was set to write an essay on the elephant, it will be remembered that, while the Englishman wrote on "Elephant-Hunting" and the Frenchman on "The Love-Affairs of the Elephant", it was a German who evolved an elephant out of his inner consciousness and a Pole who devoted himself to "The Elephant in Relation to the Polish Question." For a subject-nation to be obsessed by concern for its nationality is perhaps tiresome to others; not to be so obsessed is despicable; and the Irishman and the Pole have at least escaped the degradation of a deracialised Jew. None the less, though nationality be the first, it is not the only concern; and even an Irishman may have felt, during these years, that Irish independence was being purchased at the cost of a liberalism that was not confined by national bounds. Political science has changed so little in two thousand years that, whatever the origin of the state, it now exists primarily, as it existed in the days of Aristotle, to make life possible: the personal safety of the individual must be assured and he must be guaranteed the essentials of living. On this foundation there rises now, as in the days of Aristotle, the second law, which alone separates an assembly of men from a pack of wolves, that the state exists to make possible a life of excellence; the individual must be afforded a chance of living a nobler life. Despite sporadic crime and external war, the first condition of safety was satisfied in England; and, though death by starvation was not unknown, the existence of work-houses testified that none need starve. Because the second condition is still so far from being fulfilled and because the chance of living a noble life is confined to an infinitesimal handful of the population, a party pledged to social reform came into existence and will justify its existence so long as oppression or fear of oppression, injustice, insecurity, disease, ignorance, poverty and squalor remain to be removed. It was the business of liberalism to remove these handicaps.

How far did it succeed? The violence of political controversy in those days hid from most observers how little was being done to improve the lot of man, woman or child in England. After the passion for reversing the legislation of their predecessors had run its course, ministers did indeed carry a courageous measure of old-age pensions; their insurance act was generous in intention even if it was unneeded and ineffectual in practise; and the parliament act created a procedure for expediting social reform in the future. But how much else did they find time to achieve in the intervals of the constitutional crisis and of the unending clash over Ireland?

While they wrangled, the possibility of a noble life was brought no nearer. Hundreds of thousands were insufficiently fed, ill-clad and verminous, with insufficient air, light and warmth; millions were corrupt with phthisis, cancer or venereal disease. On these physical wrecks and starvelings education left little mark; and a century of labour combination and industrial legislation had not laid that spectre of unemployment which stunts the soul and turns cold the heart of even the healthiest and most independent when they live within sight of the margin of subsistence. Day after day the opportunity of noble living was withdrawn from the thousands of women who through moral weakness, poverty, indolence or greed were pressed as recruits to prostitution; it was withdrawn from the homes that were ruined by drink and gambling. The shadow cast by the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of modern civilisation was so dense that there still existed in England, in the twentieth century, private societies to preserve animals and children from being tortured.

From time to time a sudden attack was made on the trade in human bodies and souls known by timid English euphemism as "the white-slave traffic"; the criminal law was amended and made more vigorous; the defencelessness of children was recognised and safeguarded. For what they were worth, let all credit be given to these gingerly attempts to heal unsightly sores, provided that no one mistake part cure for complete prevention. A prison flogging may deter the pander from dealing in human flesh, but it does not dispose him to noble living for its own sake; this is begotten of a sense of beauty by education. During these years a cartoon by Max Beerbohm depicted Lord Lansdowne trying, with all the amenity of his kind, to understand just what Mr. H. G. Wells meant by the barrenness of official politics; the successive education bills of the liberal administration sacrificed the elementals of good citizenship to an ingenious game of protecting church of England children from the perils of religious instruction in the tenets of dissent; and whether in after life a man starved his children or lived on the hire of his wife's body mattered less than that for the first twelve years of existence a unitarian should be secured from believing or even understanding that God was Three-in-One and One-in-Three.

While only those who are equally ignorant of politics and of history imagine that the party system can be ended without a change in all the practises of English representative government, it is unquestionable that the sometimes artificial antagonism of two parties set eternally in opposition to each other causes undue importance to be attached to politics on their tactical side; the content is sacrificed to the form. If man's hope of noble living went unstrengthened in the years from 1906 to 1914, this was because the trustees of the nation were too busy squabbling for possession of the machine.

IV

Throughout July, 1914, all parties were working industriously to amend the home rule bill in such a way as to compensate the "ascendancy" party for the loss of its ascendancy. That solution had not been discovered when war broke out. To present a united front in face of the enemy, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law patriotically promised the prime minister their support in this latest crisis; the prime minister, not to be outdone in patriotism, undertook to postpone controversial legislation for the duration of the war. The contentious bills were left to hibernate in the statute-book; the constitutionalists in Ireland were left to compare the failure of constitutionalism with the success of treason; and the political historian observed that, once more, the major crisis had saved the government from the consequences of the minor.

Unhappily, as controversial legislation was only postponed, so the consequences of this surrender to rebellion were only postponed; more unhappily still, they were not postponed for so long. Certain lessons were learned in the years from 1911 to 1914; and they have not been forgotten.

First, the government, as the suffragettes and Orangemen had shewn, could be bullied; it either would not or could not keep order. And for more than two years it was bullied by strikers, conscriptionists, "war groups", newspaper proprietors and those who wished for a coalition; it was bullied in open session and in secret session by private members, ex-ministers and commissions of enquiry.

Secondly, officers of the British army could refuse to obey orders if commanded to suppress a political agitation with which they might sympathise; it was not made clear by the army council that privates had the same freedom if commanded to suppress a labour agitation with which they might sympathise.

Thirdly, a privy councillor might, with impunity, preach armed resistance to a law, though the result of his preaching were local bloodshed or a general war; Sir Roger Casement might not practice armed resistance in protest against the suspension of that law.

Fourthly, the word of a British minister could no longer be accepted. A political bargain is as binding as any other; and since 1910 the government had depended on nationalist support of which the price was the home rule bill. When pressure was applied, the government refused to honour its bargain; payment was to be made on new conditions and in debased coinage. It is instructive to read the list of those who acquiesced in this surrender, for the dishonour of the prime minister was shared by all of his colleagues and supporters who consented to the act of betrayal: they are English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Jewish and hybrid, so that the disgrace is not confined to a single nationality; they are men who probably pay their tradesmen, certainly their opponents at bridge. And many of them made eloquent speeches of righteous indignation when the Imperial German government abrogated the Belgian and Luxemburg treaties. In Ireland to this day and for many years to come there is not a man, woman or child who will take the British government seriously. For defence it is urged that, if the home rule act had been enforced in 1914, there would have been civil war in Ulster; temporary peace was bought at the price of civil war throughout the rest of Ireland from the Easter rising onwards, as the rest of Ireland learned from British ministers and from Sir Edward Carson that "the great questions of the time are to be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood and iron." Faced with this choice of evils, it was unfortunate that ministers selected the alternative which carried with it the repudiation of their own bond.

As the unconstructive critic is no less irritating and no more helpful than a howling child, the Irish policy of the liberal government may only be attacked by those who are prepared to suggest an alternative. The present first essential is that the imperial parliament should reestablish in Ireland a belief in its own good-faith; the second, that, as nationalist history has advanced rapidly since 1914, the Irish should be given a measure of independence relatively as great as that promised to them in the third home rule act; the third, that they should determine its form for themselves. All Ireland should be divided into electoral areas to choose a constituent assembly which would contain Ulster Protestants, Ulster Catholics, Southern Protestants, Southern Catholics and Sinn Feiners (who can enter no conference so long as there is a price on their heads). When a two-thirds majority of this constituent assembly has agreed upon a constitution, the imperial parliament should undertake to enforce it, if necessary by arms, whatever its form and without favour for any recalcitrants; and every section of parliament should pledge itself, jointly and severally, to this. The minds of those who are disturbed by talk of an Irish republic may be soothed if the word "commonwealth," sufficiently honoured in other parts of the world, be substituted. Those who see in Ireland a base of attack on England in a future war are not entitled to be heard until they have stated (1) what war they anticipate; (2) where Ireland is to find the money to build a fleet or to equip an army, and (3) how, in any war, Ireland is more immune from the supervision of the British navy than are France, Belgium and Holland.

Until Ireland has been pacified, the reciprocal murdering and incendiarism of this new Thirty Years' War will continue, at the lowest, to hinder succeeding governments in their task of reconstruction after the war, as the unsettled Irish problem hindered the task of social amelioration which had been entrusted to the liberal government in 1906. Month by month, as the shadow of Ireland advanced farther into British politics, the authority and usefulness of a great reforming party receded; and, at the end, the bruised, the broken-hearted and the disillusionised agreed that, if the liberal ministry which the genius of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had contrived and which the biggest liberal majority in history supported so long and faithfully could have been caught up to heaven on the morrow of the parliament act, every liberal would have said: "Felix opportunitate mortis."

The outbreak of war marked the death of liberalism. Freedom of speech was curtailed and suppressed until one scrupulous patriot asked in the House of Commons whether the Sermon on the Mount should not be regarded as subversive of military discipline; freedom of action was drowned by a wave of collective hysteria in which governors and governed vied with one another to impose new burdens and to bend submissive and welcoming necks to receive them. The theory of representative government, shaken to its foundations when a House of Commons which had been elected to carry the parliament bill engaged—as a parergon—in a European war, was finally destroyed when conscription was imposed without election or referendum. The lusty growth of autocracy soon choked such sickly flowers of liberalism as a care for the rights of minorities and a concern for the pleadings of conscience; though a moment's reflection would have shewn that, if Christianity is persistently thrust down the throats of all English children, a few will almost certainly accept it literally, those who looked for no qualifications to the injunction that a man must not kill were quickly taught that Christianity was not a practicable creed for times of war; and a country which prided itself on a traditional love of fair play first reviled and then persecuted conscientious objectors with so little discrimination that, when one Quaker who had acted as a stretcher-bearer received the Mons medal, he could only wear it in the prison to which he had been confined for refusing to undertake military service.

Whenever, in the first two years of the war, an article of liberal faith came in conflict with the heterogeneous policy of a coalition government, the article of faith was thrust aside. The resolutions of the Paris economic conference committed Great Britain to a tariff war with her enemies; the treaty of London converted a war which had been undertaken to satisfy British obligations to Belgium into an imperialist war in which the present and future allies of Great Britain were invited to help themselves at the expense of their neighbours; gradually there was heard less talk of a crusade on behalf of small nationalities, and the liberal party committed itself to a "knock-out blow". So committed, it could neither utter nor listen to proposals which involved less than unconditional surrender; and, though Belgian neutrality might perhaps have been vindicated and reparation secured before the war had run half its ultimate course, the imperialist policy in which liberalism acquiesced allowed of no check to hostilities until Europe was exhausted and revolution had been unloosed in Russia, to spread no man knows whither. The peace party in English politics finally assented to a settlement of which any militarist in France or Prussia would have been proud to acknowledge the authorship.

It was not to be expected that any set of political principles could remain unchanged by war, though liberalism would have been less violently mutilated if it had appealed to the heart rather than to the head of liberal leaders. How far their foreign policy contributed to the war which destroyed liberalism must be discussed later.